


Words Not Found

by runsinthefamily



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Friendship, Love, Unreliable Narrator, Unrequited Love, ambiguousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-15
Updated: 2012-02-15
Packaged: 2017-10-31 05:27:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 4,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/340430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runsinthefamily/pseuds/runsinthefamily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of drabbles based on the words in this article: http://bigthink.com/ideas/41152?page=all  Words in various other languages for love and relationships that have no equivalent word in the English language. The first two happened to be about Varric, and then I realized that they ALL had to be about Varric. </p><p>Varric, because he is the writer, the storyteller, the wordsmith.  He understands words, and what they mean, and how sometimes there is no word for what you want to say in any of the languages that you know, so you tell a lie instead, something that comes close, something that at least approaches what you need it to be …</p><p>Of course these are about Varric.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mamihlapinatapei

_**Mamihlapinatapei** (Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego): The wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start.  
Oh yes, this is an exquisite word, compressing a thrilling and scary relationship moment. It’s that delicious, cusp-y moment of imminent seduction. Neither of you has mustered the courage to make a move, yet. Hands haven’t been placed on knees; you’ve not kissed. But you’ve both conveyed enough to know that it will happen soon… very soon._

***

They’re doing it again,” said Isabela to Varric, under her breath.

Varric looked over at Broody and Hawke but he’d missed it, apparently. Both were examining their cards intently. “You keep telling me about this look,” he said, “but I have yet to see -“

“You have to be watching,” she said. “For a storyteller, you’re startlingly inobservant. Look, there!”

It was brief, the length of a heartbeat perhaps, but the hope and fear and lust that seared across the table between them was nearly visible. Then Fenris glanced at his cards and raised his bet. Hawke picked up his mug and drank.

Isabela smirked at Varric, pressed her breasts against his arm and whispered into his ear. “Find the words for that.”


	2. Yuanfen

_**Yuanfen** (Chinese): A relationship by fate or destiny. This is a complex concept. It draws on principles of predetermination in Chinese culture, which dictate relationships, encounters and affinities, mostly among lovers and friends.From what I glean, in common usage yuanfen means the “binding force” that links two people together in any relationship.   
But interestingly, “fate” isn’t the same thing as “destiny.” Even if lovers are fated to find each other they may not end up together. The proverb, “have fate without destiny,” describes couples who meet, but who don’t stay together, for whatever reason. It’s interesting, to distinguish in love between the fated and the destined. Romantic comedies, of course, confound the two._

***

He tells it differently every time. The pirate, the Keeper, the apostate, the escaped slave. A few times it was even the exiled Prince. Even a failed romance, even - Maker help him - a chaste marriage was more poetic than the truth.

He still remembers kissing her. Once on the Wounded Coast, when the fire had burned low and the others were sleeping and Hawke looked sidelong at him, eyes glinting, mouth quirked just so, and he had to know what those lips tasted like. _For research,_ he’d said, leaning in. She’d kissed him back, laughing a little against his stubble.

He watched the others circle in toward her and then drift away again, no one gaining enough purchase on the wall of her determinedly platonic friendship to make it over, to find a place by her side. Anders was the hardest to witness, his desperate loneliness, his starveling stares. Varric wrote it all down, gave her the pages to read, sitting back and smirking as she laughed and blushed and shook her head at him.

He kissed her again that last afternoon, with the dust and smoke still thick in the air. They stood on the docks, Fenris and Merrill already on board Isabela’s ship, Hawke clinging to her staff as though she would fall over without it, staring past him into the city. She was leaving and he was staying and when she finally looked down at him neither of them said anything. She bent, he tipped his face up. The tears on her lips tasted bitter and salt, a promise broken even as it was given, too late, too little, eight years of _almost_ turning into _never._


	3. Cafuné

_**Cafuné** (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone’s hair._

***

They all kept secrets, all of them. Varric didn’t want to know what they were, for the most part. People hid what was shameful, or painful, or both, and the gaps those secrets left were the perfect places to fit his story into. Hawke never told him how the other twin died, on the road from Lothering. Anders never spoke of how he left the Wardens. Even Merrill had her silences, her distant, inward moments from which she startled and flushed.

Isabela, though - he had been sure that she simply didn’t bother with such things, except where they gained her an advantage. She lied, of course, with ease and facility, but actual secrets? The kind that rankled and burned? Surely not.

“Tell me something about you that I don’t know,” he asked her as they slumped companionably together at his table, everyone else either sleeping or gone. 

She smiled at him, that twinkle in her eye still sparking even at this hour, even in her exhaustion and inebriation. “Varric,” she drawled. “You know I’m an open book.”

“Come on,” he said. “There must be something.”

She blinked, sucked her lower lip. “I like having my hair brushed,” she said.

He reached out affectionately, tugged her kerchief free. Her hair fell down around her face, thick and springy and slightly greasy. “C’mere then,” he said.

She sat up, wobbled to her feet and then sat on the floor. He found his brush on his side table, pulled a chair behind her, and gathered the mass of her dark, slightly frizzy curls behind her shoulders.

“My mother used to do this,” she confessed, as he lifted a hank and began teasing the tangles out of the bottom. “When I was very young.” She snorted a little. “Our early lessons in pleasure stick, regardless of what happens afterward, I suppose.”

“Mmmn,” he agreed, remembering baths and his own mother’s face, damp tendrils of hair curling against her brow, the feel of a cloth running down his back.

Isabela was quiet after that, other than the occasional contented sigh as he worked his way slowly and thoroughly to her scalp. Her hair frizzed more as he brushed it, and in the end he set the brush aside and used his hands instead, curling thick locks about his fingers, patting and combing the mass into order. It was only when he finished and set a kiss to the top of her head that he realized she was crying, a slow and soundless leak of tears down her cheeks.

He rubbed one thumb beneath her eye. “Tears? For your mother?”

She shook her head. “No. I was done weeping over her by the time I was fourteen.”

“What, then?”

She laid her temple against his knee and he realized, with some shock, that she was hiding her face.

She didn’t answer, and he didn’t ask again, only laced his fingers through her hair, scalp to bottom, over and over.


	4. Retrouvailles

_**Retrouvailles** (French): The happiness of meeting again after a long time. This is such a basic concept, and so familiar to the growing ranks of commuter relationships, or to a relationship of lovers, who see each other only periodically for intense bursts of pleasure. I’m surprised we don’t have any equivalent word for this subset of relationship bliss. It’s a handy one for modern life._

***

She had changed and, while Varric knew that it had been inevitable, his chest hurt a little to see how much. Tan and upright and with a certain roll to her walk, loose short trousers and a tight-laced vest and a familiar blue kerchief holding back her long, sun-bleached hair. Then she saw him, and smiled, and he knew that however much time and distance and circumstance had altered her, she was still …

“Daisy,” he said, rising as she came over on light, swift feet and threw her arms around his neck. 

“Varric,” she said into his hair. 

“Let me look at you,” he said, putting her away from him. “Maker’s balls, Daisy, you look, you look like -“

“A pirate,” they said together, and her smile flashed again in her sun-brown face.


	5. Ilunga

_**Ilunga** (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.  
Apparently, in 2004, this word won the award as the world’s most difficult to translate. Although at first, I thought it did have a clear phrase equivalent in English: It’s the “three strikes and you’re out” policy. But ilunga conveys a subtler concept, because the feelings are different with each “strike.” The word elegantly conveys the progression toward intolerance, and the different shades of emotion that we feel at each stop along the way.  
Ilunga captures what I’ve described as the shade of gray complexity in marriages—Not abusive marriages, but marriages that involve infidelity, for example. We’ve got tolerance, within reason, and we’ve got gradations of tolerance, and for different reasons. And then, we have our limit. The English language to describe this state of limits and tolerance flattens out the complexity into black and white, or binary code. You put up with it, or you don’t. You “stick it out,” or not._

_Ilunga restores the gray scale, where many of us at least occasionally find ourselves in relationships, trying to love imperfect people who’ve failed us and whom we ourselves have failed._

***

The sanitarium on the edge of Hightown is one of the few places that Meredith still allows mages to come and work, mostly the very elderly, staid, bookish kind. They tend their charges with the help of motherly nurses and large, muscled orderlies. The place has a weird vibe to it, part tomb, part temple. There are gardens. There are locks on all the doors.

Varric comes once a week for an hour, which is as much as he can bear. Bartrand is sometimes lucid. Dunham, a tall, lean man with iron-gray hair and warm brown eyes, always briefs Varric before he goes in. _He’s doing well today_ , or, _He had an episode yesterday, don’t mention the bruise._ They have him on some kind of tonic, lyrium and spindleweed. Varric can’t see that it makes any difference.

Bartrand is always sitting in a chair, clean and groomed. He usually recognizes Varric. On occasion he will weep. Varric talks about the business, about the Guild, about profits and shares and employees and Bartrand watches him, his gaze confused, sometimes fearful, always intent. Eventually Varric runs out of words and they just sit in silence.

 _I’m done with him,_ Varric had said in the bowels of the earth, watching Hawke grimly butcher a deepstalker. _He’s not my brother, not anymore._

Varric watches Bartrand’s hands twist together like anxious, broken animals and wishes it were true.


	6. La Douleur Exquise

_**La Douleur Exquise** (French): The heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have.  
When I came across this word I thought of “unrequited” love. It’s not quite the same, though. “Unrequited love” describes a relationship state, but not a state of mind. Unrequited love encompasses the lover who isn’t reciprocating, as well as the lover who desires. La douleur exquise gets at the emotional heartache, specifically, of being the one whose love is unreciprocated._

***

He was used, by this point, to coming back to his rooms and finding Isabela already there, drinking his whiskey and reading his manuscripts, boots propped on his table. The addition of Anders was new.

“Evening,” he greeted them. 

“Good,” said Isabela. “Tag, you’re it.” She stood, shimmied her tunic down, and strode toward the door. 

“What?” asked Varric as she passed and got nothing but a roll of her eyes for answer. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” he asked Anders, unshipping Bianca and setting her on her stand.

Anders gave an inelegant snort and Varric realized the man was drunk. “I mean, I knew what it was,” he said, as though carrying on with a conversation already underway. “I knew what I was. I just - she said - and then. Fuck.” He groped for the mostly-empty bottle and sloshed a bit more of Corff’s finest almost-brandy into his cup.

“I thought Big Blue didn’t let you get drunk,” said Varric, carefully.

“Fuck,” said Anders and drank. “Him,” he finished. “Is it me?” he asked plaintively. “Of course it’s me, of course it is,” he answered himself. “Maker.”

“Ah,” said Varric. “We’re talking about Hawke.” He sat down and helped himself to the remnants in Isabela’s cup.

“Hawke,” mourned Anders. “Do you know. Falling in love isn’t done. Mages, I mean. They don’t do it. Apos - posates. Her dad. Married her mum, didn’t he? Love? Love?” He peered at Varric. “So why? I mean, I know why. I know.” He pushed his hands into his hair and gripped, hard.

Varric watched him, his chest aching a little. “What happened?”

“Kissed her,” said Anders. “Like an idiot.”

“She didn’t reciprocate?”

“She was, she was …” Anders ran down and then sighed, heavily. “She was very nice about it.”

Varric grimaced. “Ouch.”

“Ouch,” said Anders, sadly. “I hope, I mean, I hope … She was. Is. Was. My best friend. If I ruined that, I don’t know. One shining light in this fucking place. No offense.”

Varric huffed a laugh. “None taken. Hawke is … Hawke is special.” He considered, and then discarded the notion of telling Anders about Merrill and her own disastrous bid for Hawke’s affections. He examined Anders, now with his upper body laid across the surface of the table, his pout vanished into tight, tense lines of pain.

Funny stories? More liquor? Maybe go out and hunt down some footpads or similar? 

Anders had stopped talking, stopped moving, was simply staring at his hand where it lay a few inches from his nose. 

Well. 

“Alright, come on,” said Varric. He got Anders out of the chair, out of his boots and coat, into Varric’s bed. He rolled Anders up in a blanket and then fetched another for himself.

Just as Varric hovered on the edge of sleep, Anders spoke.

“You didn’t tell me I’d get over it.”

“Is that what Isabela said?”

“Yes.”

Varric opened his eyes, looked across the darkened room at the dim shape that was Bianca. “She’s wrong.”


	7. Koi No Yokan

_**Koi No Yokan** (Japanese): The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall into love.   
This is different than “love at first sight,” since it implies that you might have a sense of imminent love, somewhere down the road, without yet feeling it. The term captures the intimation of inevitable love in the future, rather than the instant attraction implied by love at first sight. _

***

Ferelden, obviously. The fair skin, the dark hair, even the way that she stands, shoulders back, chin out, they all proclaim her origins. The mabari is really only a grace note, unnecessary but appreciated.

“You’re sure about this?” Varric asks, leaning over the rail. The target of his interested gaze shoves a finger into the chest of a husky dockworker, who spreads his hands and begins to talk rapidly.

“She’s going places,” says Athenril, walking a silver across the back of her fingers. “People like her. Even after she’s beaten their face in. She’s got charisma, she’s got smarts. She even comes with a built-in sidekick.” She jerks her chin at a hulking young man leaning against the wall. “Brother,” she says. “They’re a hell of a team. You want some serious muscle on your little jaunt, that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Humans,” Varric muses. “Bartrand never hires non-dwarva. He’s going to want them to buy in.”

“Come three days from now, they’re no longer my employees,” says Athenril.

“Hmm,” says Varric. The woman down below pats the dockworker on the shoulder and the man gives a relieved smile, even waves a little as she turns to go. The brother falls in behind her, back a little and to the right, a motion as practiced as breathing, and Varric can almost see them in battle together, moving in perfect reciprocity.

She glances up as they pass beneath him and he is caught, no, stabbed by her lucent blue eyes. Her brows are straight, her mouth firm. Even her stride is purposeful and sure. No one moves like that in this city, short of the Knight Commander herself.

“What was that name, again?” he asks.

“Hawke,” says Athenril.

Varric nods. “Hawke,” he says, trying it out. “Nice.”


	8. Ya’aburnee

_**Ya’aburnee** (Arabic): “You bury me.” It’s a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person, because of how difficult it would be to live without them.  
The online dictionary that lists this word calls it “morbid and beautiful.” It’s the “How Could I Live Without You?” slickly insincere cliché of dating, polished into a more earnest, poetic term. _

***

 _I will write about this,_ Varric thinks, _and no one will ever believe me._

Anders, always a little too raw-boned for beauty, looking worn and heartbreakingly old, hunched on the crate. Hawke standing in front of him, huge and bulky in his Champion armor, the ridiculous hodgepodge that he had cobbled together in the years since the Arishok. For once he isn’t making it work, for once it looks like what it is; junk, held together by wire and wishes.

“No,” says Hawke. “No.”

“It’s justice.” Anders wraps his arms around himself. “It’s fair. It’s what should happen.”

“No.”

“Hawke, do it!” Sebastian, red faced and shaking. “He’s a murderer! If it had been me in there, would you -“

“Shut the fuck up!” Hawke roars and the prince flinches backward. 

“Hawke -“

“No,” says Hawke, wheeling back at Anders. “No. I don’t care. You fucking liar.”

Anders makes a noise and his face twists, grief as ugly as a wound and Varric cannot look anymore, it is too real, too naked, he loves these people too much.

“You’re not allowed,” says Hawke. “Damn you. How could you think - how could you have - you planned for me to kill you.”

“I didn’t want it to be one of them,” Anders says, fragile as a cracked vase. “I didn’t want the brand.”

A flat crack, flesh hitting flesh. Varric looks up to see them grappling, Hawke hauling Anders bodily to his feet. “Don’t do that,” Hawke gasps. “Don’t you give up now.” He shakes the other man, snarling like a mabari.

“Let - let go!”

“No.”

“Let go.”

“Fight,” says Hawke. His voice is unrecognizable with tears and rage. “Fight me.”

Light flares in Anders’ eyes, between his fingers. “Let -!”

Hawke kisses him. Anders struggles, frees his mouth briefly before Hawke pulls him in, muttering something low and desperate in between kisses. _Die,_ Varric hears and, _not without you,_ and _cannot ask me_ and then Anders is kissing back, and they are both weeping and somehow, this one time, Hawke has fixed it.


	9. Forelsket

_**Forelsket:** (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience when you’re first falling in love._

_This is a wonderful term for that blissful state, when all your senses are acute for the beloved, the pins and needles thrill of the novelty. There’s a phrase in English for this, but it’s clunky. It’s “New Relationship Energy,” or NRE._

 

***

He’s never seen Daisy so happy. She’s generally cheerful, yes, but cheer isn’t happiness, and the smile she bestows upon him when she walks in is so luminous that he nearly squints. 

“You’re floating,” he informs her.

“Am I? No, I’m not,” she says, glancing down at her feet. “Oh, wait, that’s a metaphor, isn’t it?” She smiles again, a huge, goofy grin.

“I take it things went well,” he says.

“Oh, Varric,” she sighs and drapes herself into one of his chairs. “She loves me. She said so. She wants me to live in Hightown with her! And do you know those old tracings of carvings from the ruins I showed you? She said she’s going to get a set of armor made just like those elves are wearing. In white, she says, in dragonbone. To symbolize what I’m working toward. And she wants me to teach her Elvhen. She wants, she wants…” she trails off, covers her face with her hands and then draws them away again to let her smile blind him again. “She wants me,” she whispers. “Eluvian, blood magic and all.”

“That’s -” Varric begins, but she leaps out of the chair before he can finish, turning toward the door even as it opens. 

Hawke steps in, sees Merrill, and then there are two smiles in the room, brighter than anything in Lowtown should be able to manage. They laugh a bit as they come together, arms wrapping, foreheads touching, cheeks flushed. Hawke kisses Merrill and Merrill kisses Hawke, and it seems like the room fades around them, Kirkwall fades, everything ceasing to be except the two of them and their brand-new love.

Varric coughs discreetly after a while and they disentangle, biting lips and sneaking glances and generally being too adorable for words. That is, for anyone other than Varric Tethras. 

“‘When one falls in love,’” he says, lifting his hands like a picture frame to enclose the two of them, “‘the world is made anew.’”

“Varric,” says Merrill, startled and joyous. “That’s lovely. Did you write that?”

“Sometimes I write it,” he says. “Sometimes I’m just a witness.”


	10. Saudade

_**Saudade** (Portuguese): The feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a “vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.”  
It’s interesting that saudade accommodates in one word the haunting desire for a lost love, or for an imaginary, impossible, never-to-be-experienced love. Whether the object has been lost or will never exist, it feels the same to the seeker, and leaves her in the same place: She has a desire with no future. Saudade doesn’t distinguish between a ghost, and a fantasy. Nor do our broken hearts, much of the time. _

*** 

She tells him he is free to go but it is she that leaves, nodding at him almost respectfully as she steps away. Her men follow her. He sits, listening to them as they cross the front hall, through the entry, out the front door and down the stairs. 

_You are free to go._ If there was anywhere left he wanted to be. 

The estate is clean, at least. After the riots had at last begun to subside, he’d hired people to come in and tidy up. They’d said the place had been stripped bare but he’d never had the time - no, he’d never had the courage to come see for himself. This was not how he’d wanted to remember it, bare floors, bare walls. Three or four books lay forlornly in the once-full shelves. The chair he sits in is not from the set he’d helped Hawke select during the redecoration of the Amell family home. He doesn’t know where it’s from, or how it got there. It doesn’t belong. 

There was where those stupid, massive statues used to stand. ‘Mementos,’ Hawke called them, as if Hawke had ever needed help remembering anything. The past rode hard on that famous brow, ground into every crevice and wrinkle, laden in every gesture. 

But he is doing it again. Doing it still. Telling the story. He runs his palms down the arms of the chair, trying to place the blocky dwarven stonework. Had this been here? In one of the side rooms, perhaps? The front room had had the red velvet, the upholstered Orlesian … no, that had been the Rose. 

He stands slowly, heavily. 

The sun is peeking over the roofs as he steps out onto the street. Hightown had been scarred by the exploding Chantry but not as severely as might have been expected. It was the rioting and fighting that had damaged Kirkwall most. Mages letting loose were always tough on the architecture. Even here in Hightown, there are still sections of missing cobbles and collapsed walls. He avoids passing Broody’s old squat. It burned the night after Hawke fled the city and no one has claimed the land or even cleared the blackened rubble. 

Too many spots like that. The Gallows, two thirds empty. The docks, graced with the empty pedestal where the Champion once stood. The Alienage, where the elves carefully nurse the half-burnt vhenadahl. The Hanged Man is the same, at least, though without Hawke and co. it is like a frame without a picture. 

Varric pauses by the steps to Lowtown and leans on a wall to watch the sun come up over Kirkwall, painting every building a kindly, lying gold. _Yeah, it’s a shithole,_ he’d said to Hawke once. And when Hawke raised an eyebrow, waiting for the other shoe to drop, Varric had only smiled. 

_Come with me._ That night on the pier, Hawke intense as ever, one hand outstretched, one foot on the gangway. The statue they’d built was inaccurate in all sorts of ways but they’d gotten the _posing_ right, Maker knew. 

_I can’t,_ he’d said. His first love was never a crossbow. 

It hurts to see Kirkwall like this, all the places where Blondie’s declaration wounded it still lying unhealed. There is no money, there is no time, and most of all there is no will, it seems, to restore the city. Varric rubs a thumb along the gritty stone. “Sorry, baby,” he says. It falls flat. He’s only speaking to himself. 

Enough maudlin dawdling. There are proofs of The Champion and the Keeper waiting at the Man for him, and final edits on the ‘Hawk and Wolf’ collected serial. He slaps his hands together. Corff’s ale, Norah’s behind, and Kirkwall-as-it-was, slavers and elvhen artifacts and frustrated love. Yes. 

He walks down the stairs, his step growing lighter as he descends. 


End file.
